Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Tod laughed. “My grandchild, a girl. Sol’s baby.”

  Teague let his lids fall. He said nothing.

  “Well, aren’t you glad?”

  Slowly a frown came to the papery brow. “Glad.” Tod felt he was looking at the word as he had stared at the arthropod, wondering limply when it might go away. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “What?”

  Teague sighed again, a weary, impatient sound. “What does it look like?” he said slowly, emphasizing each one-syllabled word.

  “Like April. Just like April.”

  Teague half sat up, and blinked at Tod. “You don’t mean it.”

  “Yes, eyes red as—” The image of an Earth sunset flickered near his mind but vanished as too hard to visualize. Tod pointed at the four red-capped “mushrooms” that had stood for so many years in the test-boxes in the laboratory. “Red as those.”

  “Silver hair,” said Teague.

  “Yes, beau—”

  “All over,” said Teague flatly.

  “Well, yes.”

  Teague let himself fall back on the cot and gave a disgusted snort. “A monkey.”

  “Teague!”

  “Ah-h-h … go ’way,” growled the old man. “I long ago resigned myself to what was happening to us here. A human being just can’t adapt to the kind of radioactive ruin this place is for us. Your monsters’ll breed monsters, and the monsters’ll do the same if they can, until pretty soon they just won’t breed any more. And that will be the end of that, and good riddance. …” His voice faded away. His eyes opened, looking on distant things, and gradually found themselves focused on the man who stood over him in shocked silence. “But the one thing I can’t stand is to have somebody come in here saying, ‘Oh, joy, oh happy day!’”

  “Teague …” Tod swallowed heavily.

  “Viridis eats ambition; there was going to be a city here,” said the old man distinctly. “Viridis eats humanity; there were going to be people here.” He chuckled gruesomely. “All right, all right, accept it if you have to—and you have to. But don’t come around here celebrating.”

  Tod backed to the door, his eyes horror-round, then turned and fled.

  VII

  April held him as he crouched against the wall, rocked him slightly, made soft unspellable mother-noises to him.

  “Shh, he’s all decayed, all lonesome and mad,” she murmured. “Shh. Shh.”

  Tod felt half-strangled. As a youth he had been easily moved, he recalled; he had that tightness of the throat for sympathy, for empathy, for injustices he felt the Universe was hurling at him out of its capacious store. But recently life had been placid, full of love and togetherness and a widening sense of membership with the earth and the air and all the familiar things which walked and flew and grew and bred in it. And his throat was shaped for laughter now; these feelings hurt him.

  “But he’s right,” he whispered. “Don’t you see? Right from the beginning it … it was … remember Alma had six children, April? And a little later, Carl and Moira had three? And you, only one … how long is it since the average human gave birth to only one?”

  “They used to say it was humanity’s last major mutation,” she admitted, “Multiple births … these last two thousand years. But—”

  “Eyebrow ridges,” he interrupted. “Hair … that skull, Emerald’s skull, slanting back like that; do you see the tusks on that little … baboon of Moira’s?”

  “Tod! Don’t!”

  He leaped to his feet, sprang across the room and snatched the golden helix from the shelf where it had gleamed its locked symbolism down on them ever since the landing. “Around and down!” he shouted. “Around and around and down!” He squatted beside her and pointed furiously. “Down and down into the blackest black there is; down into nothing.” He shook his fist at the sky. “You see what they do? They find the highest form of life they can and plant it here and watch it slide down into the muck!” He hurled the artifact away from him.

  “But it goes up too, round and up. Oh, Tod!” she cried. “Can you remember them, what they looked like, the way they flew, and say these things about them?”

  “I can remember Alma,” he gritted, “conceiving and gestating alone in space, while they turned their rays on her every day. You know why?” With the sudden thought, he stabbed a finger down at her. “To give her babies a head-start on Viridis, otherwise they’d have been born normal here; it would’ve taken another couple of generations to start them downhill, and they wanted us all to go together.”

  “No, Tod, no!”

  “Yes, April, yes. How much proof do you need?” He whirled on her. “Listen—remember that mushroom Teague analyzed? He had to pry spores out of it to see what it yielded. Remember the three different plants he got? Well, I was just there; I don’t know how many times before I’ve seen it, but only now it makes sense. He’s got four mushrooms now; do you see? Do you see? Even back as far as we can trace the bugs and newts on this green hell-pit, Viridis won’t let anything climb; it must fall.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You’ll give me basic biology any time,” he quoted sarcastically. “Let me tell you some biology. That mushroom yields three plants, and the plants yield animal life. Well, when the animal life fertilized those heterowhatever—”

  “Heterokaryons.”

  “Yes. Well, you don’t get animals that can evolve and improve. You get one pitiful generation of animals which breeds back into a mushroom, and there it sits hoarding its spores. Viridis wouldn’t let one puny newt, one primitive pupa build! It snatches ’em back, locks ’em up. That mushroom isn’t the beginning of everything here—it’s the end!”

  April got to her feet slowly, looking at Tod as if she had never seen him before, not in fear, but with a troubled curiosity. She crossed the room and picked up the artifact, stroked its gleaming golden coils. “You could be right,” she said in a low voice. “But that can’t be all there is to it.” She set the helix back in its place. “They wouldn’t.”

  She spoke with such intensity that for a moment that metrical formation, mighty and golden, rose again in Tod’s mind, up and up to the measureless cloud which must be a ship. He recalled the sudden shift, like a genuflection, directed at them, at him, and for that moment he could find no evil in it. Confused, he tossed his head, found himself looking out the door, seeing Moira’s youngest ambling comfortably across the compound.

  “They wouldn’t?” he snarled. He took April’s slender arm and whirled her to the door. “You know what I’d do before I’d father another one like that?” He told her specifically what he would do. “A lemur next, hm? A spider, an oyster, a jellyfish!”

  April whimpered and ran out. “Know any lullabies to a tapeworm?” he roared after her. She disappeared into the jungle, and he fell back, gasping for breath. …

  Having no stomach for careful thought nor careful choosing, having Teague for an example to follow, Tod too turned hermit. He could have survived the crisis easily perhaps, with April to help, but she did not come back. Moira and Carl were off again, wandering; the children lived their own lives, and he had no wish to see Teague. Once or twice Sol and Libra came to see him, but he snarled at them and they left him alone. It was no sacrifice. Life on Viridis was very full for the contented ones.

  He sulked in his room or poked about the compound by himself. He activated the protein converter once, but found its products tasteless, and never bothered with it again. Sometimes he would stand near the edge of the hilltop and watch the children playing in the long grass, and his lip would curl.

  Damn Teague! He’d been happy enough with Sol all those years, for all the boy’s bulging eyebrow ridges and hairy body. He had been about to accept the silent, silver Emerald, too, when the crochety old man had dropped his bomb. Once or twice Tod wondered detachedly what it was in him that was so easily reached, so completely insecure, that the suggestion of abnormality should strike so deep.

  Somebody once said, “You re
ally need to be loved, don’t you, Tod?”

  No one would love this tainted thing, father of savages who spawned animals. He didn’t deserve to be loved.

  He had never felt so alone. “I’m going to die. But I will be with you too.” That had been Alma. Huh! There was old Teague, tanning his brains in his own sour acids. Alma had believed something or other … and what had come of it? That wizened old crab lolling his life away in the lab.

  Tod spent six months that way.

  “Tod!” He came out of sleep reluctantly, because in sleep an inner self still lived with April where there was no doubt and no fury; no desertion, no loneliness.

  He opened his eyes and stared dully at the slender figure silhouetted against Viridis’ glowing sky. “April?”

  “Moira,” said the figure. The voice was cold.

  “Moira!” he said, sitting up. “I haven’t seen you for a year. More. Wh—”

  “Come,” she said. “Hurry.”

  “Come where?”

  “Come by yourself or I’ll get Carl and he’ll carry you.” She walked swiftly to the door.

  He reeled after her. “You can’t come in here and—”

  “Come on.” The voice was edged and slid out from between clenched teeth. A miserable part of him twitched in delight and told him that he was important enough to be hated. He despised himself for recognizing the twisted thought, and before he knew what he was doing he was following Moira at a steady trot.

  “Where are—” he gasped, and she said over her shoulder, “If you don’t talk you’ll go faster.”

  At the jungle margin a shadow detached itself and spoke. “Got him?”

  “Yes, Carl.”

  The shadow became Carl. He swung in behind Tod, who suddenly realized that if he did not follow the leader, the one behind would drive. He glanced back at Carl’s implacable bulk, and then put down his head and jogged doggedly along as he was told.

  They followed a small stream, crossed it on a fallen tree, and climbed a hill. Just as Tod was about to accept the worst these determined people might offer in exchange for a moment to ease his fiery lungs, Moira stopped. He stumbled into her. She caught his arm and kept him on his feet.

  “In there,” she said, pointing.

  “A finger tree.”

  “You know how to get inside,” Carl growled.

  Moira said, “She begged me not to tell you, ever. I think she was wrong.”

  “Who? What is—”

  “Inside,” said Carl, and shoved him roughly down the slope.

  His long conditioning was still with him, and reflexively he sidestepped the fanning fingers which swayed to meet him. He ducked under them, batted aside the inner phalanx, and found himself in the clear space underneath. He stopped there, gasping.

  Something moaned.

  He bent, fumbled cautiously in the blackness. He touched something smooth and alive, recoiled, touched it again. A foot.

  Someone began to cry harshly, hurtfully, the sound exploding as if through clenched hands.

  “April!”

  “I told them not to. …” and she moaned.

  “April, what is it, what’s happened?”

  “You needn’t … be,” she said, sobbed a while, and went on, “… angry. It didn’t live.”

  “What didn’t … you mean you … April, you—”

  “It wouldn’t’ve been a tapeworm,” she whispered.

  “Who—” he fell to his knees, found her face. “When did you—”

  “I was going to tell you that day, that very same day, and when you came in so angry at what Teague told you, I specially wanted to, I thought you’d … be glad.”

  “April, why didn’t you come back? If I’d known. …”

  “You said what you’d do if I ever … if you ever had another … you meant it, Tod.”

  “It’s this place, this Viridis,” he said sadly. “I went crazy.”

  He felt her wet hand on his cheek.

  “It’s all right. I just didn’t want to make it worse for you,” April said.

  “I’ll take you back.”

  “No, you can’t. I’ve been … I’ve lost a lot of … just stay with me a little while.”

  “Moira should have—”

  “She just found me,” said April. “I’ve been alone all the—I guess I made a noise. I didn’t mean to. Tod … don’t quarrel. Don’t go into a lot of … It’s all right.”

  Against her throat he cried. “All right!”

  “When you’re by yourself,” she said faintly, “you think; you think better. Did you ever think of—”

  “April!” he cried in anguish, the very sound of her pale, pain-wracked voice making this whole horror real.

  “Shh, sh. Listen,” she said rapidly. “There isn’t time, you know, Tod. Tod, did you ever think of us all, Teague and Alma and Moira and Carl and us, what we are?”

  “I know what I am.”

  “Shh. Altogether we’re a leader and mother; a word and a shield; a doubter, a mystic. …” Her voice trailed off. She coughed and he could feel the spastic jolt shoot through her body. She panted lightly for a moment and went on urgently, “Anger and prejudice and stupidity, courage, laughter, love, music … it was all aboard that ship and it’s all here on Viridis. Our children and theirs—no matter what they look like, Tod, no matter how they live or what they eat—they have that in them. Humanity isn’t just a way of walking, merely a kind of skin. It’s what we had together and what we gave Sol. It’s what the golden ones found in us and wanted for Viridis. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

  “Why Viridis?”

  “Because of what Teague said—what you said.” Her breath puffed out in the ghost of a laugh. “Basic biology … ontogeny follows phylogeny. The human fetus is a cell, an animalcule, a gilled amphibian … all up the line. It’s there in us; Viridis makes it go backward.”

  “To what?”

  “The mushroom. The spores. We’ll be spores, Tod. Together … Alma said she could be dead, and together with Teague! That’s why I said … it’s all right. This doesn’t matter, what’s happened. We live in Sol, we live in Emerald with Carl and Moira, you see? Closer, nearer than we’ve ever been.”

  Tod took a hard hold on his reason. “But back to spores—why? What then?”

  She sighed. It was unquestionably a happy sound. “They’ll be back for the reaping, and they’ll have us, Tod, all we are and all they worship: goodness and generosity and the urge to build; mercy; kindness.

  “They’re needed too,” she whispered. “And the spores make mushrooms, and the mushrooms make the heterokaryons; and from those, away from Viridis, come the life-forms to breed us—us, Tod! into whichever form is dominant. And there we’ll be, that flash of old understanding of a new idea … the special pressure on a painter’s hand that makes him a Rembrandt, the sense of architecture that turns a piano-player into a Bach. Three billion extra years of evolution, ready to help wherever it can be used. On every Earth-type planet, Tod—millions of us, blowing about in the summer wind, waiting to give. …”

  “Give! Give what Teague is now, rotten and angry?”

  “That isn’t Teague. That will die off. Teague lives with Alma in their children, and in theirs … she said she’d be with him!”

  “Me … what about me?” he breathed. “What I did to you. …”

  “Nothing, you did nothing. You live in Sol, in Emerald. Living, conscious, alive … with me. …”

  He said, “You mean … you could talk to me from Sol?”

  “I think I might.” With his forehead, bent so close to her, he felt her smile. “But I don’t think I would. Lying so close to you, why should I speak to an outsider?”

  Her breathing changed and he was suddenly terrified. “April, don’t die.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Alma didn’t.” She kissed him gently and died.

  It was a long darkness, with Tod hardly aware of roaming and raging through the jungle, of eating without tasting, of hun
gering without knowing of it. Then there was a twilight, many months long, soft and still, with restfulness here and a promise soon. Then there was a compound again, found like a dead memory, learned again just a little more readily than something new. Carl and Moira were kind, knowing the nature of justice and the limits of punishment, and at last Tod was alive again.

  He found himself one day down near the river, watching it and thinking back without fear of his own thoughts, and a growing wonder came to him. His mind had for so long dwelt on his own evil that it was hard to break new paths. He wondered with an awesome effort what manner of creatures might worship humanity for itself, and what manner of creatures humans were to be so worshipped. It was a totally new concept to him, and he was completely immersed in it, so that when Emerald slid out of the grass and stood watching him, he was frightened and shouted.

  She did not move. There was little to fear now on Viridis. All the large reptiles were gone, and there was room for the humans, the humanoids, the primates, the … children. In his shock the old reflexes played. He stared at her, her square stocky body, the silver hair which covered it all over except for the face, the palms, the soles of the feet. “A monkey!” he spat, in Teague’s tones, and the shock turned to shame. He met her eyes, April’s deep glowing rubies, and they looked back at him without fear.

  He let a vision of April grow and fill the world. The child’s rare red eyes helped (there was so little, so very little red on Viridis). He saw April at the spaceport, holding him in the dark shadows of the blockhouse while the sky flamed above them. We’ll go out like that soon, soon, Tod. Squeeze me, squeeze me … Ah, he’d said, who needs a ship?

  Another April, part of her in a dim light as she sat writing; her hair, a crescent of light loving her cheek, a band of it on her brow; then she had seen him and turned, rising, smothered his first word with her mouth. Another April wanting to smile, waiting; and April asleep, and once April sobbing because she could not find a special word to tell him what she felt for him … He brought his mind back from her in the past, from her as she was, alive in his mind, back to here, to the bright mute with the grave red eyes who stood before him, and he said, “How precious?”